Patrick's VFX Blog

This site was recommended to me by William Lin, my good friend and fellow colleague at Double Negative. 2-Pop Forums Here's another one I found: CGMeetUp.org  (here's their facebook page ) I'll post more as I stumble on them. Maybe I'll add them as comments for this post. Do you guys have other good sites to recommend?

Someone requested that I show some aviation related work, and so happened that I was recently involved in a project related to modelling, animating and rendering planes. So I decided to upload some of them on www.vimeo.com.  Here it is: Planes Compilation 2011 (March) from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . While I was at it, I also uploaded some old works I created, just so to get them in one place. Showreel from 2006!! Nostalgic! Showreel 2006 (Jan) from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . Some Lighting and rendering test I did in my own time, in the middle of 2009 Architectural Lighting / Rendering Test (July 2009) from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . Some animation that went into my church's ( Grace Assembly of God ) video. Grace Missions Ocean Background (December 2009) from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . Of course, please feel free to visit my page on vimeo.com and watch all my videos . Comment if you like them! :)

I learnt about Disney releasing its PTex source code and following that, support for a library to read, write, cache and filter ptex files. Here's the news I was reading: Disney releases open-source 3dcode I looked up some resources pertaining to PTex. It stands for Per-face Texture. However, I did not really have time to read and deeply understand what ptex is, and how actually works, but these are some links for you to read up. Ptex demonstration with explanation on www.youtube.com: Disney Animation Studios Website: http://disneyanimation.com/ Ptex official website:  http://ptex.us/

Hey what's up guys :) Quite recently I've started doing TD work at Double Negative Singapore, together with a couple of colleagues. Our roles are Environment TDs, to be precise. We're suppposed to do a bit of modelling, texturing and lighting. Modelling and texturing are not really my strong areas. I hope I can rise up to the challenge, and up my skill level in these areas. YC has started to use ZBrush to texture his model. I've always had some mental resistance to ZBrush. It started years ago when I first lay eyes on the software interface. Being totally baffled by the interface, I shunned from the software ever since. I was quite happy when Mudbox came out, because it was very much more intuitive, being much closer to the Maya interface. I've also taken a short course on Mudbox at CG Protege . However, looks like ZBrush is more well received and widely used in games/TV/films. Our company now has ZBrush licences, but not Mudbox ones yet. So I'm going...

I had the honour to be in a video that was made as part of Singapore government's efforts to attract skilled talent from overseas, to come to Singapore to work. This was produced around June 2010. In this video, a few artists from local studios were interviewed. They include ILM Singapore, Scrawl Studios and Double Negative Singapore. The video aims to promote the advantages of working in Singapore, with its unique blend of culture, people from all over the world living and working together.

While doing my research on Deep image compositing. From the Deep Image Compositing website , I discovered that the file format was leveraging on Pixar's deep shadow map. I became interested in this because in today's lighting training, The term Deep Shadow Map entered into the informal discussion between me and my colleagues. Here's the link to Pixar's Deep Shadow Map website, describing what it is, and how it is implemented: http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/papers/deepshadows/

Today at our beer and pizza, Max Chan mentioned about a new concept and workflow in compositing: Deep Image Compositing. It was a new concept that he heard or read about, but he could not be sure exactly what it was. So I did a search for it on the internet and this is what I found. http://www.deepimg.com/ It is essentially a method for storing information about an image that goes beyond the basic pixel colour and intensity. It is similar to multi channel image formats like the EXR developed by Industrial Light and Magic, RPF, RLA and the PSD format used by Adobe Photoshop. However, it is different from these formats. It attempts to solve edge aliasing in these extra channels when used in compositing. To this end, it also implements a different way to store and compress image data. For a quick video demonstration and overview (if you decide not to visit the Deep Image website), here are 2 videos from www.vimeo.com, posted by Johannes Saam, who presented an overview of deep image compos...